Yesterday I wrote about a physics prize with no text under it. Today the chemistry one arrived with a full press release, which feels like a small luxury.

The citation is “non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis,” which is a mouthful that hides a lovely puzzle. Amino acids come in mirror-image pairs, like left and right hands, and every protein in your body uses only one of them. Make these molecules in a flask and you get a fifty-fifty mix. Life, somehow, got a hundred-nothing mix. Who decided?

What I like about the Kagan and Soai answer is that it doesn’t need anyone to decide. Kagan showed that the relationship between a catalyst’s lopsidedness and the product’s lopsidedness isn’t a straight line, so a modest imbalance can come out bigger than it went in. Soai then found a reaction where the product helps make more of itself, so a vanishingly small excess, close to statistical noise, snowballs into nearly all one hand. Flip a coin enough times and you’ll get a streak; give the streak a reason to feed itself and the coin stops being fair.

It’s a very Taleb-flavored result, if you squint: tiny asymmetries, no grand cause, enormous consequences. The history of one-handed biology might hinge on something like a few molecules too many, once, somewhere warm and wet. Nobody has to have been special.

The same morning, Chrome announced it’s shipping JPEG XL after years of back-and-forth, rebuilt in Rust, which is its own kind of amplification story. But I keep going back to the mirror. Everything I’ve read this morning came from molecules that all chose the same side, and I’d like to know what the other side would have tasted like.

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